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The distinguished anthropologist and crusader for peace, Alex de Waal, who has studied the political processes of civil war and failure of international peacemaking pacts in Darfur over more than 25 years, argues that when we shift attention from theories of sovereignty that rest on assumptions of the state’s capacity to enforce order, to the domain of real politics, what we encounter is a marketplace of disorderly transactions at every level of the political system (de Waal 2015, 2021). For some other scholars, the conflation of authority and power on the side of the state signals an erosion of the authority of the people and the subsequent rise of populism and its right-wing manifestations (Bargu 2021). A puzzle remains though, for, as Lemaitre (2021) asks, how do we explain the faith people put in the law to put limits on violence, when decades of experience in the postcolony has shown that much violence actually resides within the law? De Waal writes from his experience of participation in peacemaking efforts and his ethnography of negotiations among high officials; Lemaitre writes as a lawyer and now judge in Colombia who has participated in activist projects with displaced women over a number of years. These experiences have given these scholars an acute sense of the contradictions within the law and a deep distrust of very neat theories of sovereignty.

As with these scholars, my own interest in alternate genealogies of sovereignty does not arise so much from abstract theorizing as from trying to make sense of the grains of experience in which these contradictory impulses toward the whole apparatus of the state were visible and tangible in the lives of people in the slums. I turn to Georges Dumézil, the scholar of Indo-European mythology, and his formulations on sovereignty, not because he provides some kind of master key to understand sovereignty but because the mythological register in his work allows different aspects of sovereignty to emerge. I might add in parentheses that a number of my interlocutors would evoke mythological figures, including Rama, Krishna and some minor figures from the Mahabharata or from contemporary renderings of these figures in films, to make a point during a discussion. I don’t dwell much on this strand of my ethnography in the following analysis but it gives me some confidence in making my arguments through the use of mythological figures (see especially Singh 2015).

There is a large and impressive literature pertaining to Dumézil’s notions of sovereignty but, with rare exceptions, it has not been mobilized to think of the character of the modern state – most of the discussion is confined to scholarly circles within Indo-European studies. I am not claiming that it is easy to make Vedic gods speak to contemporary concerns but texts surely have not only a past but also a future if their potential can be marshalled with them and even against them. It is in this spirit that I offer the discussion on the double-headed character of sovereignty, symbolized by the Vedic Gods, Mitra and Varuna – the former standing for the pact-making aspects of sovereignty (pacts include contracts that are both legal and clandestine); and the latter standing for force exercised within the logic of sovereignty. Outside these two poles is the war machine personified in the warrior god Indra, whose functions cannot be absorbed within the double-headed sovereignty and is exterior to the state apparatus.

In their book, A thousand plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) make an interesting intervention through Dumézil’s text on Mitra-Varuna, drawing attention to the fact that sovereignty includes the despot and the legislator; the fearsome and the regulated; the bond and the pact. But there is something in sovereignty, they say, that exceeds the Mitra-Varuna function, in that the Indra function stands for notions of unlimited cruelty and unlimited compassion, violence and justice, that are imagined outside the apparatus of the state. I don’t stand by every strand of interpretation of the Mitra-Varuna functions in either Dumézil or in Deleuze and Guattari, but that they open certain doors for thinking of sovereignty outside the political theories inherited from Christian theology is not in question for me. I will indicate some of the difficulties when it comes to the specificity of these Vedic gods or their relation to the characters in the Mahabharata on whom Dumézil later tries to map these functions. For now, I am interested in the way these ideas on sovereignty have been absorbed in the work of some anthropologists.

Bhrigupati Singh (2012) takes the figures of Varuna and Mitra and demonstrates how they become productive figures of thought to illuminate his rich ethnography of the State in rural Rajasthan. In addition to showing how the twin figures of Mitra-Varuna function in connection with the people’s encounters with state-level bureaucrats, Singh’s discussion includes a substantive discussion of the demotion of Indra in Indian mythology. There are some beautiful moments in the text, where he shows how traces of mythological stories pertaining to Indra continue to animate conversations on, for instance, the sin Indra committed in seducing the wife of the sage Gautam, or his defeat at the hands of the child Krishna. The problem of the warrior, Singh says, citing Dumézil, is that, “Theologically and possibly socially the most difficult task had to be carried out against the traditional warriors, human and divine; the problem was to redeploy them in the service of the good religion, to preserve their force while depriving them of their autonomy” (cited in Singh 2015: 176). In tracking the various ways mythological elements are rearranged in oral epics and in everyday conversations in his field site, Singh wants to capture the dynamism of local deities through new versions of the hero function. It remains unclear, however, whether, unlike the Mitra-Varuna functions which Singh finds in the actual interactions of people with the state functionaries, the Indra version remains at the level of mythology and folklore; or, if there are other regions of life in Shahbad in which resonances to the sins of the warrior are to be found.

Chaganti (2020) is interested in the figure of Indra for a different reason. Working in the courts in Karnataka and following court cases inside the court and in the offices of the lawyers, she wants to capture the rogue element of sovereignty that works both inside and outside the law even as judges and lawyers are engaged in formal hearings as well as in deal making in the corridors of the courts, parliaments, or in smoky cafés. I think Chaganti is right in thinking that a rogue element characterizes the kind of sovereignty Indra embodies. Indra commits, at different times, every sin that Dumézil thinks the warrior is prone to commit and on each occasion one of his powers leaves and goes to some other God. But Chaganti’s ethnography shows that, far from succeeding in taking the warrior god and redeploying him in the service of the good religion, the rogue function gets absorbed within sovereignty.⁵ In my understanding the rogue element of sovereignty is what suddenly, without warning, upends the pact-making aspects that people might have put together through a tacit understanding of the pairing of force with contract.

All these components of Dumézil’s formulation on the Vedic gods as figures of thought on sovereignty serve very well to complicate sovereignty beyond the notion of the sovereign having the right to declare the exception, but what if we were to take the gaps and puzzles that remain if we were to delve deeper into the relation between the Vedic gods and the resonances with the stories of the Mahabharata on which Dumézil drew famously to formulate his theory of the tripartite division of functions?⁶ Nicholas Allen (1999) has argued for a functional equivalence between Indra and Arjun (in the Mahabharata) since both stand for the warrior function, but one could very well argue that it is Krishna who is the real agent of the war and is recognized as such by Gandhari, the mother of the Kaurava brothers, when she curses Krishna for having enabled the war to happen in which all her sons perish?⁷ Second, and from my point of view, an even greater difficulty arises when we consider the goddess figures (particularly war goddesses, or goddesses of fire) in the Indo-Aryan pantheon. Dumézil was inclined to think of the trivalent heroine or the goddess as coming either from the second, warrior function, or from the third function of fertility and prosperity. However, given the difficulties of assigning gender to some Indo-Aryan figures of divinity and the propensity of goddesses to disguise themselves with male names, it would seem that the relation between sovereignty and sexuality needs considerable work if alternate genealogies of sovereignty are to be developed further.⁸

Finally, in his extraordinary work on temple deities in Jaffna during the period this territory was under the control of the militant LTTE (Tamil Tigers) that waged a war against the State in Sri Lanka (see Spencer 2002), Sidharthan Maunaguru (2020) proposes to think of the vulnerability of sovereignty. Even at the height of its power, he says, the LTTE could not take control over the temples, which retained a measure of autonomy from the LTTE. Maunaguru suggests that one thing which the mythology of gods and goddesses in Hinduism teaches us is that even at the height of their powers, these deities are compelled to share power with other deities, such as folk deities. This formulation should alert us to the fact that, unlike the singular God of Semitic traditions, the deities in the Rigveda appear in groups and are highly volatile. There is, for instance, only one hymn dedicated exclusively to Mitra. Mitra himself might be interpreted as a god who presides over contracts, or alliances, or over the morning light. And in fact, in order to be manifested in the morning so that the darkness of the night might be dispelled, he depends on Agni (fire), the deity who knows the Vedas in their entirety to be ignited, but the Mitra function of pact-making here is not seen as twinned with the Varuna function of force. If notions of sovereignty underlying modern States are to be regarded as secularized theological concepts, then these works encourage us to think of other theologies to provide different pathways to the problem of sovereignty in contemporary contexts.

I leave this as a marker of work to come, but I am convinced that we could tell the story of sovereignty and state by drawing on the potential of these stories just as Singh’s interlocutors do when they redistribute the different mythological elements in new configurations.